November night after the cold river, when warm
In the stone kitchen MacDiarmid's voice was talking,
The gamekeeper's kind-to-me wife put a tray of biscuits
And a specially-made cup of tea into my hands.
The men were talking kindly, drinking whisky,
And no-one was angry with me for being there.
Old Mr Ross put his feet up on the silver bar of the range -
Unbooted, socks dishevelled, the heel and toe darned.
MacDiarmid, philosophical, launched into ardent poetry -
Resonant, unstoppable, the fiery certainty of the whisky mind -
Shouting across the Cairngorms to our pre-eminent
Precambrian and Silurian hills, where we were transfigured -
Immortals, enriched by the poor rocky landscape
And the oldness of everything.
